by Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson - University of Essexrepository.essex.ac.uk/16281/1/Hist Workshop J-2016-Higgs-17-38.pdf · by Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson There has long

Women, Occupations and Work in theVictorian Censuses Revisited

by Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson

There has long been a tendency amongst historians to view the Victorianand Edwardian censuses of England and Wales as a problematic source forstudying the work of women. Census-taking in the period was a predomin-antly male affair – census enumerators, who were mainly men, gave tohousehold heads, again mostly male, census household schedules whichthey filled up using instructions provided by the exclusively male civil ser-vants of the General Register Office (GRO) in London. The Victorian enu-merators collected the household schedules and copied them into censusenumeration books (CEBs), and then dispatched these to the officials atthe GRO. When the latter received the CEBs they proceeded to ‘abstract’the information in them using classification and coding systems they haddevised to create tables and commentaries to be published in ParliamentaryPapers.1 This, it has been argued, introduced biases against recording thework of women at almost every stage. If such under-enumeration existed itwould create signal problems for understanding the changing role of womenin the economy and in the family, and indeed the nature of economic de-velopment during the Industrial Revolution as a whole. This article is in twoparts. In the first, Edward Higgs examines the historiography on the issue,and his own position in it, and in the second, Amanda Wilkinson presentsnew evidence on the reliability of the census returns.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WOMEN’S WORK IN THEBRITISH CENSUSES

Historians’ concerns over the recording of women’s work in the census havebeen voiced over a considerable period. In History Workshop Journal in1986, for example, Sonya Rose argued that ‘many historians have shiedaway from census data because of some very serious shortcomings in theextent to which women’s occupations are reflected in the enumerator’s re-cords. Homework and casual employment in general are under-reported inthe censuses’.2 The following year, in their path-breaking work FamilyFortunes, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall insisted: ‘information onwomen’s occupations where they were not a household head is so unreliableas to be almost useless, and, by definition, married women were not

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considered heads of households’.3 Similarly, in History Workshop Journal 35(1993), in ‘Women, Work and the Census: a Problem for Historians ofWomen’, Bridget Hill, while claiming ‘censuses are – or should be – a wayin to knowledge of work done by women’, asserted that, ‘what was commonto all censuses was that women’s work was consistently under-recorded’.4 In1995, Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries argued in ‘Women’s Labour ForceParticipation and the Transition to the Male Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865’, that although ‘many authors have used nineteenth-century censusdata to demonstrate declining female participation and increasing employ-ment segregation . . . the census enumeration of women’s employment isdemonstrably inaccurate’. According to Horrell and Humphries, the mostsubstantial underreporting was to be found in the case of married women, inthe agricultural sector, in manufacturing and in certain service occupations.Such work, they concluded, was ‘invisible’ to male observers.5 Instead theybased their analysis of women’s participation in the labour force on familybudgets in the works of contemporary social commentators, ParliamentaryPapers, working-class autobiographies, and similar sources.6 Such a strategyis perhaps understandable given the fact that they were primarily concernedto examine the period when censuses did not give information for individualoccupations. However, this did not stop them from querying the usefulnessof censuses in general. The same year Humphries, in her contribution toJune Purvis’s Women’s History, repeated these claims regarding the prob-lems with the census, and showed that her and Horrell’s budgets recordedfar higher levels of labour participation for women than in the censustables.7 However, their figures on women with occupational titles fromthe same sources showed similarities with my revised census figures forwomen’s employment in 1841.8 More recently Alison Kay rejected usingthe census for the study of women retailers in nineteenth-century Londonon the grounds that the source ‘suffers from a number of well-documentedflaws’, and turned instead to the use of insurance records.9 The same year,2006, Hannah Barker in her examination of late eighteenth and early nine-teenth century female enterprise in Northern England also claimed that it‘has been well established that the census is particularly problematic in thecase of women’s work’.10 Returning to the subject of the usefulness of thecensus in an article with Carmen Sarasua in Feminist Economics in 2012,Jane Humphries again claimed that the work of women was ‘left off therecord’ in censuses across the world, including those in Britain. From thisshe and Sarasua argue that the apparent U-shaped curve in women’s par-ticipation rates in the economy over the period of industrialization is asimplistic rendering of the reality of women’s lives, and in part a ‘statisticalartefact’ of official tables.11

It is clear, therefore, that there is a considerable body of opinion thatholds that the censuses under-enumerated the work of women during theVictorian era. What is less clear, however, is where the factual evidence forthis conclusion with respect to the British censuses, at least in terms of

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occupational titles, is to be found. How has it been shown that they are

‘demonstrably inaccurate’? Hill and Rose appear not to have carried out any

research on the source itself, Hill basing her comments on the work, pri-

marily, of Davidoff and Hall, and a 1987 article of mine in History

Workshop Journal, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth

Century Censuses’.12 Although earlier research had raised issues about par-

ticular aspects of the problem, my article was one of the first works to

confront directly the problems of women’s work in the nineteenth-century

British censuses. Horrell and Humphries, and Humphries and Sarasua, also

cite my work, whereas Davidoff and Hall do not back up their general

statements. Kay and Barker also cite me as the source for their comments

on the Victorian censuses. In summary, it seems that the assumption that the

work of Victorian women in the British censuses is under enumerated relies

to a worrying extent on the comments made by me some thirty years ago,

which I subsequently repeated in my guide to the census records, Making

Sense of the Census in 1989.13

There have been a number of attempts since then to rehabilitate the

Victorian census as a source for women’s work as a riposte, in part, to

my original arguments, and to those of historians who agreed with me. In

1998 John McKay noted that the published Census Reports indicated that

there was consistently higher employment for married women in nineteenth-

century Lancashire than elsewhere, and in industrial areas within that

county rather than in rural area, all of which pointed to the usefulness of

the source.14 In 1999 Michael Anderson showed from research based on

samples of the CEBs for Lancashire in 1851 that large numbers of women

continued to work in the textile factories after they had married. They only

appeared to move out of such employment when they had children and had

no-one in the household to provide childcare. His conclusion was that the

manuscript censuses were a useful source for women’s work.15 This subse-

quently led Leigh Shaw-Taylor to argue that the married work of women in

factories was very well recorded, and that it was unlikely that unmarried

women’s work would be less well enumerated.16 However, it is perhaps

unwise to base statements about all women’s work on the basis of

Lancashire alone, because, as Shaw-Taylor himself stresses, the experience

of women was very diverse, and ‘any simple aggregate national narrative

about women’s experience of the labour market during the industrial revo-

lution is likely to be seriously misleading’.17 As Nigel Goose has recently

summarized the situation, ’the more informed critics of the census data have

concluded that the jury is out on the question of under-enumeration [of

women’s employment]’.18

Given the use that has been made of my early work, and the controversy

it has created, it would perhaps be useful to revisit my original arguments,

especially in the light of a more recent attempt to gauge the reliability of the

census data.19

Women, Occupations and Work in the Victorian Censuses Revisited 19



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REVISITING ‘WOMEN, OCCUPATIONS AND WORK IN THENINETEENTH CENTURY CENSUSES’

In my 1987 HWJ article I identified what I regarded as a number of short-comings in the recording of the work of women in the Victorian censuses.They included the problems of casual and seasonal employments; the diffi-culty of determining whether women’s work in the home was part of themarket economy or not; and the influence of the Victorian ideology ofseparate spheres for men and women on the exclusion of women from therecorded occupied population. As already noted, Victorian census-takingwas a predominantly male activity, and this, I argued, is crucial for under-standing how the economic activities of women were recorded, or not, as thecase might be. I covered a lot of ground, bringing a good deal of evidence tobear on my subject, but my overall conclusion was not in fact a direct re-jection of the usefulness of the census records, while some of my argumentswere perhaps, with hindsight, not as grounded as they might have been.

First, I pointed out that the census schedules given to Victorian house-holders to fill out indicated that the work of women was only to be recordedas an occupation if they were ‘regularly employed from home’, thus leadingto the omission of much casual work from the census schedules.20 I also gaveconsiderable emphasis to the fact that the Victorian censuses were usuallytaken in March or April to avoid the movements associated with the arableharvest. This, I argued, must have led to the under-enumeration of seasonallabour performed by women. Also, since the published census tables couldonly deal in single occupations, the multiple activities of women were under-estimated.21 My broader point was that the census recorded occupationaltitles, which were as much social designations as the modern concept of‘gainful employment’ – occupational titles recorded what people werecalled or designated as much as what they did.22

Although there is much to these arguments, it should however be notedthat such problems must have applied to some extent to men and boys aswell as to women and girls. In a somewhat less well-cited article, I pointedout that large numbers of men and whole families were active in seasonalagriculture in the Victorian period, whether in the cereal harvest or in hop-picking. Whatever their occupations in the CEBs, they would not be likely tofigure as ‘seasonal hop pickers’, and the term does not appear in the pub-lished Census Reports.23 My conclusion was that although labour inputs bymen as well as women into agriculture in the Victorian period are probablyunderestimated by the census because of the omission of seasonal and casuallabour, any likely revisions would not materially alter the picture of Englandas having, in global terms, a uniquely small agricultural sector in the midnineteenth century.24 Moreover, as Raphael Samuel noted many years ago,the economic activities of many Victorian men were often as irregular andseasonal as those of women and children, and we should not base a pictureof their economic situation solely on the experience of factory production,especially in the North of England.25 Nor should we over-estimate how




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geographically widespread the large-scale factory production was, at least inthe early part of the nineteenth century. In the 1831 census, parish clerkswere asked how many people were occupied (1) in agriculture; (2) in manu-facture for ‘export’ out of the locality; (3) in retail trade or handicrafts forsale in the locality; (4) as capitalists, merchants and professionals; (5) asminers, fishermen, non-agricultural labourers; (6) those retired or disabled;(7) and finally as servants. Tony Wrigley’s examination of the publishedresults of this enumeration shows that nearly two thirds of the manufactur-ing population in England were to be found in as few as twenty-four out ofthe nearly 700 hundreds (county subdivisions), or their equivalents, in thecountry as a whole.26 Perhaps when conceptualizing occupational structuresin the period we ought to think as much about the worlds of WilliamCobbett’s Rural Rides and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and theLondon Poor, as about that of Friedrich Engels’s Manchester. Calculatingsuch labour inputs is certainly a problem, but despite this no-one has eversuggested abandoning the use of the census to examine the work of men,and such problems are still a feature of census-taking today. AmandaWilkinson’s findings, discussed below, also indicate that such deficiencieswere not as severe in the original census enumerators’ books as one mightfear. However, a detailed revision of the figures to provide a total for thenumber of all persons economically active in Britain from the nineteenth-century censuses is plainly beyond the scope of an article such as this.

Implicit in some of what I and others argued about the under-enumeration of women in the Victorian censuses was the belief that howmale householders, census enumerators and the census authorities treatedwomen’s work was influenced by the Victorian view that woman should bethe domestic ‘angel in the house’ rather than entering the external, masculineworld of work. Essentially, or so the argument went, the fact of womenworking outside the home was seen as shameful, and so what work theydid would be hidden, or would not be seen as an occupation in census terms.The classic discussion of this ideology of ‘separate spheres’ for the nine-teenth-century middle classes is, of course, the 1987 work of Davidoff andHall, but how far could similar attitudes be found in the working classes atthis time? Davidoff had herself, in a contribution to a collection in 1979,queried the Victorian separation of home and work in the case oflandladies.27

Much recent work has also undermined the concept of a strict separationbetween the work of men and women, at least among middle-class women,offering empirical evidence on women’s business roles in nineteenth-centuryBritain. Here we might include the collection Women, Business and Financein Nineteenth Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, edited byRobert Beachy, Beatrice Craig and Alastair Owens; Hannah Barker’s TheBusiness of Women; Alison Kay’s The Foundations of Female Entrepreneur-ship; Women in Business, 1700–1850, by Nicola Phillips; and the work ofJennifer Aston.28 Some of these authors however, as already noted, draw




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directly upon my own work to point to the supposed problematic nature ofthe census as a source. In the London working class Andrew August,through an analysis of late Victorian census enumerators’ books from theEast End, showed already in 1994 that ‘many married women’ rather thanembracing the ‘separate spheres ideology, and the male breadwinner ideal’,had ‘earned wages when their household economies were relatively stable’.Nevertheless, he too noted apparent differences in how far census enumer-ators were prepared to include the work of women in the returns, andclaimed that this made his figures for women’s labour-force participationa low estimate.29

Much of what I said in my 1987 article about the influence of separatespheres ideology on women’s work in the census related to the occupationaltables in the published Census Reports, rather than to the data in the originalhousehold schedules and CEBs. I noted that between 1851 and 1871 womenworking at home on ‘domestic duties’ were to be included in the tables in theCensus Reports showing ‘the occupations of the people’. In the same periodthe wives of innkeepers, lodging-house keepers, shopkeepers, butchers,farmers and shoemakers, were included under special terms (with ‘wife’added to the husband’s occupation as in ‘shoemaker’s wife’) in the appro-priate section of the tables because they were ‘supposed to take part imme-diately in their husband’s business’. However, such categories disappearedfrom the published tables from 1881 onwards, and women working in thehome were also placed in a new ‘Unoccupied’ class.30 I described too howCharles Booth, when in the 1880s he attempted to create a consistent seriesof occupational totals for the period 1801 to 1881, simply pushed this ex-clusion of women back into the figures before 1881, a strategy accepted bymany subsequent historians.31

I did look at some original CEBs, from Colyton in Devon, Spitalfields inLondon, and Matlock in Derbyshire in 1851 and 1881, and noted variationsbetween differing enumeration districts with regard to the occupations ofwomen, and their proportions in work. The variations, I suggested, might‘again reflect a particular enumerator’s habit of ignoring the paid work ofwomen rather than a low economic participation rate’.32 However, I did notaddress any other possible reasons for the geographically ‘spotty’ nature ofwomen’s employment, such as differential proximity to work places, or workbeing put out to family or neighbours. Perhaps I was guilty of applying theideas of Davidoff and Hall on separate spheres without attention to theirdetailed approach to archival research, and to context and specificity.

Moreover, some of my criticisms of the recording of women’s work in thecensus returns related not to under-enumeration but to mis-enumeration.Drawing upon research for my doctoral thesis, I pointed to the numbers of‘housekeepers’ in Rochdale and Rutland in 1871 who were resident in thehomes of kin, or even the heads of householders, and were probably notdomestic servants but working in the family home. I also drew attention tothe number of ‘domestic’ servants working in the households of retailers and




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farmers, who may have been active, at least part-time, in retailing or agri-

cultural tasks.33 However, these may again be problems associated primarily

with the published tables, and might easily be adjusted for when considering

the original manuscript returns. Even this may have been taking the argu-

ment too far since, as Michael Anderson subsequently showed, the clerks at

the Census Office in London seem to have been aware of such problems and

made allowance when abstracting data for the published Census Reports.34

I brought together much of the evidence that was available at the time

from those who had used CEBs to reveal problems with women’s census

occupations in the Victorian period – my own detailed work on domestic

servants in Rochdale;35 Judy Lown’s work on the silk industry in Essex;36

Walton and McGloin’s study of landladies in Keswick in 1901;37 Jessica

Gerrard’s study of the casual employment of villagers in country houses;38

Miller’s study of field workers in Victorian Gloucestershire;39 and John

Holley’s study of married women in two businesses in south-east

Scotland.40 However, this coverage was somewhat episodic and patchy –

how typical were the problems revealed, often in passing, by these local

studies? After all, I did not list all the local studies that did not meet similar

problems and thus had not raised such methodological issues. Given the

resource constraints in the 1970s and 1980s associated with inputting and

analysing the data from the CEBs on computer, any examination of such

issues had to be at the local level, and was thus inherently prone to such

limitations. Amanda Wilkinson’s evidence regarding women’s employment

in the British census based on case studies, given below, covers a wider

geographical area, and approaches the issue with new techniques of analysis.However, despite such problems, in my 1987 article I counselled using the

census returns with care, rather than steering clear of the source a together:

The conclusion to be drawn from this work is that it is necessary to treat

the occupational information in the manuscript census enumerators’

books with caution, and that the historian’s use of the published census

reports should be even more circumspect. Without a knowledge of local

economic and social conditions, to give one a feel for possible problems

of underenumeration, and a grasp of the shifting administrative conven-

tions of census tabulation, the use of these sources may be fraught with

dangers.41

I expressed similar reservations in Making Sense of the Census two years

later. However, by 2005, when a revised and updated version of this work

was issued as Making Sense of the Census Revisited, although still cautious I

struck a more positive note, claiming that ‘in the absence of alternative

sources, the census enumerators’ books are still our best source for under-

standing the economic activities of women in the Victorian period’.42 As the

work of Humphries, Horrell and others have shown, other sources do exist




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for studying this subject, so the question is really whether the census is agood enough source to be used profitably.

The next section of this article will present evidence from the work ofAmanda Wilkinson which suggests that my increasing confidence in theCEBs as a source for the history of women’s work perhaps still did notgo far enough. Given that the problems with women’s employment in theCensus Reports have been well chronicled already, and that the British CEBsfor the period 1851 to 1911 are now available in a single machine-readabledataset,43 the published census tables are less vital for historical research.But it is therefore important to establish the reliability of the CEBs above allelse.44 Here new evidence on the reliability of the census returns in EastAnglia and London will be presented first, and problems with examiningwomen’s work via small-scale studies will also be addressed.

We hope that this will help to tip the balance so that Nigel Goose’shypothetical jury of historians judging the reliability of the census willcome down provisionally on the side of ‘Not Guilty’.

CASE STUDIESAdmission records relating to county asylums are a source rarely used orconsulted for this purpose. Much of the detailed research carried out to dateon the recording of women’s work in nineteenth-century England and Waleshas been small in scale and very local in nature, focusing on the records of asingle employer, or on the census enumeration books relating to a smallcommunity. This has created difficulties when small-scale research studiesare then used to generalize about the enumeration of women’s work. Aregional perspective, as in the following analysis for East Anglia andLondon, may help to overcome some of these problems. But how on thisscale does one find other sources to corroborate the evidence in the CEBs?Despite extensive searches through the wage books and employment recordsheld in regional record offices across the east of England and London, veryfew suitable sources have been found. For this type of record linkage withthe censuses each source needs to supply for every female employee hername, an address, and if possible her age, to ensure that cross referencingwith the CEBs and other sources is reliable. Most of the employment recordsavailable do not contain full names: the majority give initials, or even justthe number of people working on a given day. Very few of those which doprovide names will give addresses, or any other means of categorically iden-tifying individual workers. Given, therefore, the limited number of sourcesagainst which the CEBs can be cross referenced, it has been necessary here toturn to other sources that give information on the work carried out bywomen at the time of a census.

The asylum records examined for the present study covering the mainprovincial towns of East Anglia – Norwich, Colchester, Brentwood andIpswich – contained information on every woman admitted to the CountyAsylums. These were St Andrew’s Hospital near Norwich, St Audry’s in




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Melton near Ipswich, and Warley Hospital near Brentwood in Essex. Bysearching the entire asylum population for all women admitted to the asy-lums within the three months following a census, it was possible to ascertainthe names of these women, their ages, their occupations prior to admission,secondary information on their immediate families, and the address at whichthey were in residence before entering the asylums.45 We assume that womenwho were given occupational titles were employed in the appropriate work:it is difficult to see why they would have lied since there is no suggestion thatwomen would get better treatment if they worked. The ‘three month rule’was applied to ensure that, as far as possible, the statistics would not beaffected when women changed their economic status. It was then possible touse this information to trace many of these women in the relevant censuses,and to compare how well the occupational details in the registers matchedthose in the CEBs.

An entry was considered a match if the details of occupation given in thepatient register corresponded exactly with those in the CEBs, and ideallyboth in terms of address and kin. The matches shown in Graph 1 relate towomen who were recorded as being married or widowed on admittance tothe asylums, and include both those who were recorded as having no occu-pation, and those who were employed. In some instances, where it waspossible to identify a woman through her kin, then these were also classifiedas a match. Furthermore, in a small number of cases included in the figuresunder matches what could be regarded as a partial match sometimesoccurred. Martha Miller, for example, was recorded in the patient recordsas being a ‘Blacksmith’s wife’ (therefore unemployed), but in the CEBs shewas recorded as being ‘formerly a dressmaker’. She was still unemployed butmore detail was given in the CEBs in this instance. Whilst this could bedescribed as a match of employment status rather than of occupation, this initself is still a valuable result, since it is important to match those who werenot working as well as those who were, if a full picture of employment statusis to be obtained through the study of the censuses. Of course, these womenwere relatively poor, and we would not expect middle-class women to berepresented, but if the women were recorded with occupations then theywere plainly not affected by separate-spheres ideology.

It can be seen clearly in Graph 1 that the percentage of instances whereinformation given in the patient registers matched that given in the censuseswas high, and increased over time. In Ipswich in 1881, for example, 100percent of the details given relating to married and widowed womenmatched.

In each asylum servants – housekeepers, housemaids, and the like – madeup a disproportionately high number of recorded admissions. After these,dressmakers, charwomen, laundresses, washerwomen and school mistressesseem to have been the most likely candidates for suffering mental illness.While silk weavers, stay-makers, tailoresses and other ‘key’ occupationswere also admitted, their numbers were very small in proportion to those




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present in the towns as a whole. Many of the unoccupied married women

were recorded as being ‘wife of labourer’, or ‘wife of agricultural labourer’,

indicating their low social standing. The preponderance of lower working-

class occupations is, of course, to be expected, since the public County

Asylums were intended for those who were unable to afford medical treat-

ment. We are looking primarily at the very poorest women in society, and

perhaps unsurprisingly these were the women who were suffering in the

majority of cases with ‘exhaustion of melancholia’ (what we would probably

refer to now as severe, chronic depression).The probable reason for the high match rate between the two sets of

sources, is explained by some of the Warley records for 1871. The case

books for the early years of the Warley Hospital (prior to c.1875) no

longer exist, and all that remain are the ‘Notice of Admission’ forms that

were used in the pauper asylum system to section the patients.47 These detail

the physician’s findings and the orders from the Justice of the Peace for the

patients to be admitted. The personal details were given by the head of the

household in which the patient was staying, normally the husband, brother

or mother. The person giving the woman’s details was, therefore in many

cases, the same person who completed the census schedule perhaps only

days before. The details in the asylum registers were taken down not by

an enumerator, but by a Justice of the Peace and a medical officer. It seems

somewhat improbable that a next of kin trying to deal with the sectioning of

a loved one in an acute state of ill health, and most likely frightened and

Graph 1. Occupational matches for married and widowed women in the County Asylum Patient

Registers and the relevant CEBs

0

25

50

75

100

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

Norwich

Suffolk

Essex

Percentage of cases where the occupation recorded for a woman in the Patient Registermatches with the census in each given census year. A woman is defined as being of 14 years and over.

Source: Census of England and Wales 1851—1901: Norwich, Ipswich and Essex AsylumRecords.46




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distressed themselves, would supply misleading information to save face, orto fit in with an ideology of the middle classes.

Of those admitted (including married, widowed and single women), 39.9percent of women in Norwich are recorded as having an occupation, 42.9percent of the Ipswich women, and 27.3 percent of those in Essex.48

Although the ill health of many of the poor women admitted would haveaffected their ability to work, it might be expected, therefore, that the num-bers showing an occupation would be relatively high. In the enumerationdistricts examined, on the other hand, there will have been some women whowere in the fortunate position of being able to choose not to work, and, assuch, it might be expected that the numbers shown as working in thesedistricts might be lowered as a result. The fact that the figures are as highas they are makes it improbable that there were large numbers of womenwhose formal work had gone unrecorded by the census.

It might be argued that all this is a study in language, in what people werecalled, and that such studies must always be trumped by those that comparecensus data to records that deal with actual employment, wherever they exist.However, because of the paucity of good employment records from the period(already noted), any studies based upon them must necessarily risk beinggeographically limited. An example of these problems can be seen inLown’s study of women working in the Courtauld silk mill in mid nine-teenth-century Halstead, Essex. Lown consulted Courtauld’s employmentregisters and obtained a random sample of 1,009 workers, taken from atotal of 172 households, who were working in the mill in 1861. Out of theseworkers, 575 were female, most apparently single. One hundred and sixty ofthese households were located in the census returns for Halstead, another twoin the village of Little Maplestead, one in Great Maplestead, one in CastleHedingham, one in Colne Engaine, and one in Stisted (leaving five house-holds unaccounted for). In the course of her research, Lown attempted tocross reference the details of the workers she had found in the Courtauldemployment registers with the census returns of 1861. She concluded that,of the married women working in the mill, ‘not a great many evade [occupa-tional] classification’,49 since the majority of the women she traced were re-corded as having the same occupation in the census returns and theemployment records.

It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that she also claimed that it was thenorm for enumerator bias to play a part in occupational enumeration, andthat women’s occupations were normally left blank, when her own findingssuggested the opposite. This may be explained by her observation that ‘strawplaiting evades classification’.50 Straw plaiting is known to have been aprimary occupation for women living in the Halstead area of Essex in thelatter half of the nineteenth century, and its omission from the census re-turns would certainly prove that the occupational enumeration of marriedand single women was problematic, if not hopelessly compromised. Lownsuggested that the lack of straw plaiters in the census was likely to have been




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due to the fact that straw plaiting, being an occupation where much of thework was carried out at home, was not considered ‘regular’ work. Therefore,she suggested that the women concerned were not considered to be fullyengaged in employment, and that their occupations thus did not need to bereported in the census returns. This aside has been used by some later his-torians to cast doubt on the reliability of the census returns as a whole.

Lown’s argument would initially appear well founded, but her findingswere misleading due to the problems related to using a small sample in arestricted locality. Her sample was located primarily in Halstead, with thewomen traced in the census returns living in the environs of the silk mill inthe centre of a fairly large market town. As noted above, only six of hersample households were in the villages around the town, and these werefamilies who were linked to the mill – mill workers, not straw plaiterswho tended to be the wives and children of agricultural and rural labourers.Thus, it was not that straw plaiting was being ignored by the enumerators asshe suggested, rather it was that Lown was looking in the wrong place forthem. Research on the villages around Halstead shows that straw plaitersmost certainly were present, and in great numbers. In each of the years 1851,1861, 1871 and in some cases 1881, more women were recorded as strawplaiters in the villages around Halstead than in any other female occupation.In the village of Castle Hedingham in 1861, the year on which Lown’s re-search was based,163 female straw plaiters were recorded in the census re-turns: thirty-five percent of women over the age of fourteen. The next mostpopulous occupation title was, unsurprisingly, ‘domestic servant’ withtwenty-seven women so recorded.51 Likewise in Little Maplestead52 andGreat Maplestead straw plaiting was by far the largest reported occupationfor women in the censuses.53 In a cluster of four villages studied in theHalstead area the only one which did not follow the trend was Pebmarsh.This community was centred around a silk throwing mill, with ninety-twowomen recorded as silk throwsters, and, as might be expected, only twentystraw plaiters.54 Using a small sample from a single employer, or censusmanuscripts or reports from a single community, is thus fraught with prob-lems, and cannot reliably represent a single area, let alone an entire nationover time. It is also of interest here that the censuses were indeed recordingwork that was casual and based on the home.

* * *

The levels of poverty and the bad living conditions experienced by many ofthe London working classes during the latter half of the nineteenth centurywere such that for large numbers of families, the ‘luxury’ of the wife simplybeing a housewife and mother was not a possibility. The image of the angelin the house, the domestic goddess of Victorian domestic ideology, wassomething that those living in the slums of the East End could onlydream of, if it occurred to them at all. It may not have been considered




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‘correct’ for women to work during the Victorian age, but the ‘lady of leis-ure’ was a middle-class ideal, not a working-class reality.

There is little doubt that a large proportion of women did carry out paidwork in order to survive. Ellen Ross noted that A. L. Bowley’s pre-FirstWorld War study, which examined working households in twelve Britishtowns, found that, ‘only about five percent of unskilled workers’ householdscould survive on the man’s wages alone’.55 This left something in excess ofninety percent of such households requiring a supplementary wage in orderto escape the workhouse or starvation. It would be wrong to suggest, how-ever, that ninety percent of women would therefore have to be working, as alarge number of these households would have been home to children ofworking age who could themselves supplement the income of the breadwin-ner. In Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, MichaelAnderson described how in households working in mills in Preston, whenthe parent was over the age of thirty-five, sixty-nine percent had at least oneco-residing child in employment.56

Ross argued in 1993 that ‘the large married women’s work force inLondon, often unlisted by census enumerators either because the male‘‘household head’’ failed to mention it, or because the census taker viewedthe wife’s work as insignificant, has remained largely invisible even today’.57

However, it is not at all clear that this is the case. A study of all women infour enumeration districts (respectively in Bethnal Green, Spitalfields,Camberwell, and Saffron Hill) suggests that their employment was notinvisible, nor un-recorded in the CEBs. The findings summarized inGraphs 2–5 suggest that the census offers a window into women’s work inLondon during the nineteenth century, and accurately tracks the changesin occupational opportunities that women experienced.

A comparison of the graphs reveals marked differences between thesedistricts, and also distinct patterns in the enumeration of working women.Spitalfields shows a steep drop in the percentage of women who were mar-ried or widowed and in employment, and a fluctuating level of employmentin single women. In Camberwell, however, the variations are very slight andthe working patterns show little change over sixty years beyond a slow butsteady increase in the percentage of women who were married or widowedand had an occupation. Bethnal Green, located a little further from thecentre of the city than Spitalfields, shows a correspondingly less markeddecline in married and widowed women’s work and less fluctuation in theproportion of single women working. Finally, Saffron Hill shows an intri-guing pattern with both married and widowed women who worked, and alsothose who were not employed, dropping as a proportion of the women in thedistrict, whilst single women formed a greater percentage of the womenworking recorded in the district overall. This might suggest a decline inmarriage in the area. However, the figures for 1901 may skew the resultdue to the dramatic decline in population in the area between 1891 and 1901.At its peak in 1861 the enumeration district was home to over 700 women.




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By 1901 however only 102 remained, and nearly half were unmarried – asignificant, but unexplained, change in the demographic structure.

As regards the types of job shown in the census, if the CEBs were notrecording casual and irregular women’s work as has been suggested, then itmight be expected that a relatively small number of occupations wouldappear: perhaps some tailoresses, a few shop-keepers, laundresses, char-women, the odd nurse or midwife, a teacher or two per school, and so on.What is actually seen is totally different. Over the sixty years (1851–1901)178 different job titles are given in Bethnal Green, and a similar number in

Graph 2. The percentage of women in Spitalfields enumerated as working or having no occupation.

0

25

50

75

100

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

Married and Widowed/Working Married and Widowed/No Occupation

Single/Working Single/No Occupation

Percentage of all women by marital and occupational status in each census.A woman is defined as being of fourteen years of age or over.

Source: Census of England and Wales — Spitalfields, 1851—1901.

Graph 3. The percentage of women in Camberwell St. George enumerated as working or

having no occupation.

0

20

40

60

80

100

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

Perc

enta

ge o

f al

l wom

en b

y m

arita

l an

d oc

cupa

tiona

l st

atus

in e

ach

cens

us*



Source: Census of England and Wales – Spitalfields, 1851—1901.




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Spitalfields. These occupations are as diverse as waterproof maker, sweet-meat maker, farrier and valentine maker. The usual women’s jobs are all inevidence, dressmaker, charwoman, domestic servant, and so on, but in 1881alone thirty-six job titles appear for the first time, including velvet-coatmaker and paste fitter.58 In addition to these, a high proportion of theoccupations recorded over the whole period examined here are whatwould be regarded as casual or seasonal jobs such as straw-hat maker andwaterproof maker, and were based in workshops scattered around the area.In Saffron Hill a truly staggering 218 different occupation titles are given,

Graph 4. The percentage of women in Bethnal Green who were enumerated as working or having

no occupation.

0

25

50

75

100

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

Married and Widowed/Working

Percentage of all women by marital and occupational status in each census.A woman is defined as being of fourteen years of age or over.

Married and Widowed/No Occupation


Source: Census of England and Wales, Bethnal Green Church/South, 1851—1901.

Graph 5. The percentage of women in Saffron Hill enumerated as working or having no

occupation.

0

25

50

75

100

Percentage of all women by martial and occupational status in each census. A woman is defined as being of fourteen years of age or over.

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901



Source: Census of England and Wales – Saffron Hill, 1851—1901.




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including ‘milk business’, looking-glass maker, gold-chains maker, gold-leafmaker, and japaner. (These last probably relate to the district’s proximity toHatton Garden, the jewellery district). Camberwell stands out for sheernovelty, being home to 181 different occupation titles, including burlesqueactresses, some dancers and an electrical primer tester. If such specializedoccupations are being recorded in the CEBs, then this would suggest a de-tailed recording of women’s work.

It would appear, therefore, that the census, far from failing to showspecialized labour patterns, shows them very clearly. It is not simply thechanging patterns of employment that appear in the census – the comingand going of different occupations over the years – but the fact that occu-pations known to be seasonal in nature, and not necessarily taking place atthe time of year when the census was taken, appear in the CEBs. For ex-ample mantle making is stated by Clementina Black to be a seasonal occu-pation with serious ‘slack’ times (late winter and spring), when minimalwork was available.59 However, in nearly every CEB studied, numerousmantle makers can be seen. The same can be said of other casual and sea-sonal occupations such as wood cutters and straw bonnet makers, char-women, rag sorters and hawkers.

Removing single women from the analysis and showing only married andwidowed women, provides an even more dramatic picture, as seen inGraph 6. It is still Camberwell here that has the smallest proportion ofmarried and widowed women in work, one third that of Spitalfields in1851. However, the number slowly begins to rise as the number of work-ing-class women in the district increased. Saffron Hill shows its mixed for-tunes as the number of married women carrying out paid work fluctuates,but forty percent of them are still recorded as working in 1901. For BethnalGreen and neighbouring Spitalfields, however, the graph shows a steep fallin married women stating an occupation – a decline that proved catastrophicfor the families concerned.

Bethnal Green and Spitalfields illustrate how the census is sensitive tochanges in a district, and how well women’s work must have been recorded.These two districts were home to silk weavers, originally based inSpitalfields, then spilling over into the western end of Bethnal Green.Most of Spitalfields was home to weavers, which explains why the propor-tion of women in work was so much higher than in neighbouring BethnalGreen. However, between 1830 and 1870 silk weaving in the area col-lapsed.60 By 1860 weaving was in decline but families were still hangingon in hope of a reprieve. The Cobden free trade treaty with France ofthat year sealed their fate. An examination of the CEBs for both districtsshows that in the early years, 1851–61, they were heavily populated with silkweavers and winders, and entire families were involved in the trade. By 1901,however, not a single female weaver was listed in the Spitalfields enumer-ation district concerned, and only a very small number in Bethnal Green.61

The picture is of an entire workforce wiped out by changing trade patterns,




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its fate mirrored perfectly in the CEBs, and clearly evident in the steep

decline in occupied women in the graphs.In most instances, the results found in the CEBs mirror known changes in

circumstance in a district, and also correlate with the figures given in other

sources, notably the Women’s Industrial Council reports62 and Charles

Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London. In Booth’s samples and

notebooks for streets which were coloured black, dark blue, light blue and

purple in his maps of social class distribution (and therefore predominantly

working-class), we find that, in the poorer streets, he records on average

around thirty percent of married and widowed women as being employed.63

When comparing this figure with the graphs presented here it is immediately

noticeable that for 1891 (and 1901) the proportion of married and widowed

women in employment in the areas studied also averages around thirty

percent. Therefore, the numbers given in the census for married and

widowed women in work in the districts studied were consistent with

those found by Booth. Whether all women who were in work on the night

of the census stated their occupation can never be known. The London

censuses do, however, match closely other sources from the time, and they

also clearly show the myriad positions, both regular and casual, that were

open to women. Whilst they may not offer an exhaustive record of every

woman in an occupation, they do offer an extremely detailed picture of the

Graph 6. The percentage of married and widowed women in Bethnal Green, Camberwell, Saffron

Hill and Spitalfields recorded as having an occupation in the census.

0

25

50

75

100

Percentage of married and widowed women recorded as being in employment in the CEBs.A woman is defined as being of 14 years of age and over.

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

Bethnal Green

Camberwell

Saffron Hill

Spitalfields

Source: Censuses of England and Source: Censuses of England and Wales, 1851—1901.




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socio-economic status of the districts at the time, and are sensitive to thechanges experienced by those living and working there.

To establish the accuracy of the enumeration of working women inLondon, however, it is appropriate not only to consider whether the patternsof occupational enumeration shown in the graphs mirror the changes inoccupational opportunities known to have been available within the city,but also briefly to compare the results of this analysis with the results of thecorresponding study discussed here, of the enumeration districts in the pro-vincial towns. In Norwich, on average, fifty-one percent of women recordedas having an occupation were married or widowed, while for Ipswich andColchester the figures are thirty-eight and forty percent respectively. InLondon the average percentage of employed women who were married orwidowed was fifty-five percent in Spitalfields, forty-seven percent in BethnalGreen and Saffron Hill, and thirty-four percent in Camberwell. The per-centage of married and widowed women recorded as being in employment inthe London districts is thus very similar to that recorded for the provincialtowns. Allowance has to be made for the possibility that women’s work wasunder-enumerated in the CEBs for both sets of communities, but the cor-relation between the types of work recorded in the census and the nature ofthe work known to have been available suggests that it is far more likely thatboth are actually recording women’s occupations rather well. Further re-search is necessary to be able to say with certainty that this was the case, butthis study has shown so far that in enumeration districts spread throughoutLondon and the Eastern counties, the census enumeration of women’s workmirrors closely what we know of the history of the districts concerned.

* * *

The conclusion to be drawn from the above analysis is that although thereare plainly problems with the nineteenth-century censuses in regard to theanalysis of women’s employment, these do not necessarily invalidate theiruse. As Higgs pointed out in 1987, and in subsequent works, the changes tothe classification of women’s occupations in the Census Reports reflectedideological shifts in the understanding of women’s role in society.64

However, on the evidence presented here these ideological limitations donot necessarily affect the raw returns in the CEBs. Perhaps too much hasbeen made of some isolated studies showing, or at least purporting to show,under-enumeration. The CEBs certainly do not pick up all casual, seasonal,and other irregular employment. However, such work was not confined towomen. The analysis undertaken here requires more follow up, but with newsources becoming available it will soon be possible to examine women’swork in the census at the national level. The resultant findings will be pre-sented fully in an intended monograph. In the meantime there appears nogood reason why historians should not make full use of this extraordinary




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source for reconstructing the social and economic roles of women in latenineteenth and early twentieth-century England and Wales.

Edward Higgs completed his doctoral research at the University of Oxford in1978. From 1978 to 1993he was an archivist at the Public Record Office(now the National Archives) in London, and specialized in the public use ofcensus returns. He then became a senior research fellow at the WellcomeUnit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, 1993–6. After beinga lecturer at the University of Exeter from 1996 to 2000, he moved to theHistory Department at the University of Essex, where he is now Professor inHistory and Head of Department. His main current research interests are inthe history of state information gathering, personal identification and thedevelopment of biometrics. He is the author of such books as TheInformation State in England (2003); Identifying the English: a History ofPersonal Identification 1500 to the Present (2011); and Making Sense of theCensus: the Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 (1989).

Amanda Wilkinson is currently the Eastern ARC Research Fellow in DigitalHumanities at the University of Essex, where she is examining women’swork in the census using the Integrated Census Microdata (I–CeM) dataset.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Readers may be interested to read ‘Labouring Women; a reply to Eric Hobsbawm’, by SallyAlexander, Anna Davin and Eve Hostettler (HWJ 8, autumn 1979, pp. 174–82), an earlycomment on the nineteenth-century census as a record of married women’s paid employments.Census enumerators, we argued, overlooked their employment because it was often casual,seasonal, part-time and intermittent and patterns of employment varied with the life-cycle.Much home-work was done (as it still is) in the home, in the interstices of domestic labour,and might be invisible in official sources, as it was sometimes to husbands and children. Theseclaims were based on the authors’ own research (some published, some in process) on agricul-tural work and on Victorian London, and were a riposte to the claims of much labour historythat married women in the nineteenth century did not work. Our sources – besides those citedby Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson (Henry Mayhew, Parliamentary Papers, SelectCommittees, Charles Booth, Clementina Black for instance) – included memoirs and oralhistories and our own research was buttressed by the work of members of the LondonFeminist History network, by the Political Economy of Women group, and by a cluster offeminist historians gathered around Leonore Davidoff and Paul Thompson in Essex. Theextent of women’s employment, its reach beyond the categories of the Census, its value forfamily survival and economic productivity and for the shape and timing of the IndustrialRevolution (as Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson so thoroughly documented) were our purposeand project; we were arguing for the inclusion of women’s work in Labour and Social Historyand for the economic and political value of women’s labour in and outside the home, especiallythat of married, widowed and older women.

Sally Alexander and Anna Davin

1 For a description of processes at each census and the Census Reports created, see EdwardHiggs, Christine Jones, Kevin Schurer and Amanda Wilkinson, The Integrated CensusMicrodata (I–CeM) Guide (http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/ICeM/documents/icem_guide.pdf), pp. 1–152. In 1801–31 the forms (only headcounts) were filled in for parishes bylocal overseers. For 1841–1901, householders (they didn’t have to be male but often were) filledout household schedules, which were then copied, and probably simplified, by enumerators into




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the special enumeration books for dispatch to the Census Office in London. Enumerators couldbe women from 1891. In 1911 the census authorities in England and Wales dispensed with theenumeration books and worked directly from the household schedules, although the Scotscontinued to use enumeration books. After 1911 the household schedules were used.

2 Sonya O. Rose, ‘Gender at Work: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism’, HistoryWorkshop Journal 21, 1986, p. 116.

3 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the EnglishMiddle Class, 1780–1850, London, 1987.

4 Bridget Hill, ‘Women, Work and the Census: a Problem for Historians of Women’,History Workshop Journal 35, 1993, pp. 79, 82.

5 Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘Women’s Labour Force Participation and theTransition to the Male-breadwinner Family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review 48: 1,1995, pp. 94–5.

6 Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women’s Labour Force Participation’, pp. 89–117.7 Jane Humphries, ‘Women and Paid Work’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945: an

Introduction, ed. June Purvis, London, 1995, pp. 90–8.8 Edward Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth-century Censuses’,

History Workshop Journal 23, 1987, pp. 59–80.9 Alison C. Kay, ‘Retailing, Respectability and the Independent Woman in Nineteenth-

century London’, in Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: RethinkingSeparate Spheres, ed. Robert Beachy, Beatrice Craig and Alastair Owens, Oxford, 2006, p. 154.

10 Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development inNorthern England 1760–1830, Oxford, 2006, p. 45.

11 Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasua, ‘Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’sLabor Force Participation in the European Past’, Feminist Economics 18: 4, 2012, pp. 39–67.

12 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, pp. 59–80.13 Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census: the Manuscript Returns for England and

Wales, 1801–1901, London, 1989, p. 81.14 John McKay, ‘Married Women and Work in Nineteenth-century Lancashire: the

Evidence of the 1851 and 1861 census reports’, Local Population Studies 61, 1998, pp. 25–37.15 Michael Anderson, ‘What Can the mid-Victorian Censuses tell us about Variations in

Married Women’s Employment?’, Local Population Studies 62, 1999, pp. 9–30.16 Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse Experiences: the Geography of Adult Female

Employment in England and the 1851 Census’, in Women’s Work in Industrial England:Regional and Local Perspectives, ed. Nigel Goose, Hatfield, 2007, p. 39.

17 Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse Experiences’, p. 50.18 Nigel Goose, ‘Working Women in Industrial England’, in Women’s Work in Industrial

England: Regional and Local Perspectives, ed. Nigel Goose, Hatfield, 2007, p. 39.19 Amanda Wilkinson, ‘Women and Occupations in the Census of England and Wales:

1851–1901’, University of Essex PhD Thesis, 2012.20 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 63.21 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, pp. 67–8.22 Higgs, Making Sense of the Census, pp. 78–9. See also Editorial Note above.23 Edward Higgs, ‘Occupational Censuses and the Agricultural Workforce in Victorian

England and Wales’, Economic History Review 48: 4 ,1995, p. 705.24 Higgs, ‘Occupational Censuses and the Agricultural Workforce’, p. 712.25 Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol.

I, ed. Harold J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, London, 1976, pp. 123–60.26 The author wishes to thank Professor Sir Tony Wrigley for permission to quote this

material from his forthcoming work The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition froman Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution.

27 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home andWork? Landladies and Lodgers in nineteenth and twentieth-century England’, in Fit Work forWomen, ed. Sandra Burman, Oxford and New York, 1979, pp. 64–97.

28 Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Beachy, Craig andOwens Barker, The Business of Women; Alison Kay, The Foundations of FemaleEntrepreneurship, London, 2009; Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700–1850,Woodbridge, 2006; Paolo di Martino and Jennifer Aston, ‘Risk and Success: ReassessingFemale Entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England’, Economic HistorySociety Conference, March 2014.




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29 Andrew August, ‘How Separate a Sphere? Poor Women and Paid Work in lateVictorian London’, Journal of Family History 19, 1994, pp. 285–309.

30 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, pp. 70–1.31 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 72.32 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, pp. 64–7.33 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 69.34 Michael Anderson, ‘Mis-specification of Servant Occupations in the 1851 Census: a

Problem Revisited’, Local Population Studies 60, 1998, pp. 58–64.35 Edward Higgs, Domestic Servants and Households in Rochdale, 1851–1871, New York,

1986.36 Judith Lown, ‘Gender and Class during Industrialisation: a study of the Halstead Silk

Industry in Essex, 1825–1900’ unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1983, p. 335.37 John W. Walton and P. R. McGloin, ‘Holiday Resorts and their Visitors: Some Sources

for the Local Historian’, The Local Historian 13: 6, 1979, p. 328.38 Jessica Gerrard, ‘Invisible Servants: the Country House and the Local Community’,

Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57: 136, 1984, p. 178.39 Celia Miller, ‘The Hidden Workforce: Female Field Workers in Gloucestershire, 1870–

1901’, Southern History 6, 1984, pp. 139–55.40 J. C. Holley, ‘The Redivision of Labour: Two Firms in nineteenth century South East

Scotland’, unpublished PhD, University of Edinburgh, 1978, p. 183.41 Higgs, ‘Women, Occupations and Work’, p. 76.42 Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census Revisited. Census Records for England and

Wales, 1801–1901: a Handbook for Historical Researchers, London, 2005, p. 103.43 Now that the British census returns for the Victorian and Edwardian periods are

available for downloading online via the Integrated Census Microdata (I–CeM) project(http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/icem/default.htm) a more systematic examination ofwomen’s employment from the CEBs has become possible.

44 The relationship between new estimates of the female working population taken fromthe CEBs and the figures given in the contemporary Census Reports will be the subject of afuture monograph.

45 The details of every woman admitted to the workhouse in the three months following acensus in the years 1851–1901 for St Andrew’s in Norwich, 1871–1901 for the Warley Hospitalin Essex and 1871–1880 and 1901 for St Audry’s in Ipswich were collected and cross-referencedwith the CEBs. The cases consulted totalled 146 for Norwich, fifty-six for Ipswich and eighty-five for Warley. Per year, then, the numbers of observations were not large, but a general trendemerges.

46 Warley Hospital Patient Admissions, Essex Record Office: A/H 10/2/2–16; NorfolkRecord Office: HH/18/1–5 to HH/22/1–4, SAH 175–180; Suffolk Record Office: ID 407/B1/4–7.

47 Notice of Admission, Warley Hospital, 1871: Warley Hospital Patient Admissions,Essex Record Office, A/H 10/2/11/3/6.

48 Since these women were admitted over a considerable period of time, it is not possible tocompare the percentages with specific census populations.

49 Lown, ‘Gender and Class’, p. 335. Lown repeated this argument in her Women andIndustrialisation, p. 91, n. 29.

50 Lown, ‘Gender and Class’, p. 335.51 Census of England and Wales 1861: Castle Hedingham, TNA, RG9/1112.52 Census of England and Wales 1861: Little Maplestead, TNA, RG9/1111.53 Census of England and Wales 1861: Great Maplestead, TNA, RG9/1111.54 Census of England and Wales 1861: Pebmarsh, TNA, RG9/1111.55 Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918, Oxford, 1993,

p. 45.56 Anderson, Family Structure, p. 116.57 Ross, Love and Toil, p. 45.58 There are in all cases significantly more job titles in the CEBs than are shown, but

slightly differing names for identical jobs were discounted.59 Clementina Black, Married Women’s Work (1915), London 1983, p. 93.60 Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: a Study in the Relationship Between Classes in

Victorian London (Oxford 1971), London, 2013 p. 100–1.




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61 Hilda Kean and Bruce Wheeler, in ‘Making History in Bethnal Green: Different Storiesof Nineteenth-Century Silk Weavers’, History Workshop Journal 56, pp. 217–30, suggest thatthe decline in silk weaving in Bethnal Green was not as severe as previously suggested, and thatpockets of silk weavers remained in the East End with young women entering the professionthroughout the nineteenth-century. Whilst there is evidence of small numbers of women re-maining in weaving, a study of the census for Spitalfields and Bethnal Green as a whole shows adecline from 12.7% of women working in silk weaving in 1851 to less than 2% by 1901, and0.2% of women recorded as being employed in silk weaving by 1911.

62 The Occupations of Women according to the Census of England and Wales, 1911.Summary Tables arranged and compiled by L. Wyatt Papworth M.A. and Dorothy M.Zimmern M.A., ed. Lucy [Wyatt] Papworth, Women’s Industrial Council, London, 1914.

63 Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 vols 1889–1903, ed. Charles Booth,London, vol. 2, 1891, pp. 46–213.

64 Edward Higgs, ‘The State and Statistics in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Promotionof the Public Sphere or Boundary Maintenance?’, in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbersand the People in Modern Britain, c. 1750–c. 2000, ed. Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara, London,2011, pp. 67–83; Edward Higgs, ‘The Linguistic Construction of Social and Medical Categoriesin the Work of the English General Register Office’, in The Qualitative Dimension ofQuantitative Demography, ed. Simon Szreter, Arunachalam Dharmalingam and HaniaSholkamy, Oxford, 2004, pp. 86–106.




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Documents

by Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson - University of Essexrepository.essex.ac.uk/16281/1/Hist Workshop J-2016-Higgs-17-38.pdf · by Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson There has long